Giving it away has now haunted me. Father passed away two years ago and a bunch of computing equipment he bought for me had been donated years before he had passed when it was worth very little. Now in this post covid era all of those things are 'vintage' and super expensive. I have tracked down some of the original equipment through the people I originally gave it to but it has not really been possible to get those things back. Yes I was a mild hoarder aspiring minimalist before but now I have become a full on hoarder. I desperately do extreme organizing in places like my basement to be able to contain so much of the stuff I have. I don't really know how to reconcile this fear of losing something for good.
A fellow hacker at VCF once mentioned to me that this obsession that many geeks have should graduate into letting go of items because down the road you can always buy another one if it scratches your itch again. He made a good point.
I'm going through my own journey with this at the moment, the thing I keep telling myself is that "this item will have a better life somewhere else" and "my house isn't a landfill". It's tough though.
Plus selling stuff is a full-time job really and it's annoying AF if it's not your day job. So I guess the question is - are you going to ever sell it? If not, then it doesn't really matter if it's expensive, it's just taking up space.
I've gotten rid of a lot of stuff I've accumulated over the years--including most computer-related hardware and software I don't use. One thing I find hard is that you know you have stuff that someone would be delighted to get for cheap/free. But it really isn't worth my time to try to make that connection. And a lot of it is niche enough that I doubt I'd find takers at a yard sale out in the country.
Keeping things isn't free, especially at scale. And it's not just about the space, as you've noticed organising and keeping track both of what you have and where to find it is a lot of hassle. Only for 95% of things decreasing in value over time, with no reliable way to identify the 5% worth keeping.
Your income/purchasing power definitely plays a role here too. Hoarding is more worth it if you don't have an efficient way to covert time into money.
I disagree. It’s another pathological behavior. In many of these cases you are taking your problem, something you have no use for, and turning it into someone else's problem. My wife and sister in law are terrible about this. Rather than just getting rid of things they go to a relative to sit around for years or decades, out of sight, before finally making their way to the trash. I absolutely hate it when the sister in law shows up with a new box of “priceless treasures” for us to deal with.
Giving things away definitely is a win. Good Will seems to be a quick solution for this - is it a good place to give things away? Hope the things find a second life.
“This is too <whatever> to get rid of!”
Wrong. Throw it away and don’t replace it.